It is true…Black Lives Matter… It is true…All Lives Matter… It is true…Blue Lives Matter… It is true… racism exists… It is true…almost all police officers are good and honorable people trying to keep their communities safe… It is true…almost all people are good, loving, honorable people who treat others with respect and dignity… It is true…no one is helped when government and social institutions put their thumb on the scale of justice to harm or benefit anyone on the basis of their race…

What happened to George Floyd, no matter what his background, was wrong. The rioting and looting in response to the criminal behavior of the police officer in Minnesota that apparently killed Floyd, however, is criminal. I believe in protesting. March in the streets all you want, say whatever you want, but don’t vandalize, don’t loot, don’t threaten others with violence. That is criminal, and should be treated as such, without discrimination as to the content of the speech. On this question, I think all agree.

So, How did we get to this… Read More

Here’s a crucial2019academic peer reviewed study that finds that police shootings are overwhelmingly justified, and are NOT racially biased. Soooo, why has this study never made front page news?

Simply stated, it doesn’t fit the liberal/MSM narrative. I searched Google for the leading professor’s name. There were ZERO MSM stories in the first two Google pages.

I suspect the liberal professors who published this study have ruined their academic careers. It would be awkward for the universities to fire them, so instead they simply will never be promoted. I’m sure the authors understood this probable penalty before releasing their results — which makes these researchers gutsy academics. Such courage in academia is indeed rare today.

Note that these profs are not from backwater colleges. It’s from profs at Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Maryland.

In the summarizing article below from MSU, I’ve highlighted (inbold) what I deem to be the salient points. The article also includes a link to the actual study.

Let’s be clear: There ARE instances of… Read More

The Beautiful Wife forwarded a column by Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, to a liberal friend of hers. Other than being an economist for half a century and having written ten books, Williams is a Black man who lived through poverty and real racism while growing up in Philadelphia. The ensuing incident tells a large part of the reason why we have the divide in our country. Then it gets worse.

Dr. Williams was not schooling people in this column about the misguided support of the current movement in America that is justifying release of criminals prematurely from jails, looting and rioting in the name of George Floyd and de-policing our cities. He could easily school them on that. What he wrote about in this column was the plight of “the poor” in America.

The column wrote about the fact that people below the poverty line have a better life in America than most middle-class in Europe and certainly have larger living quarters than the Europeans.

He told about all the material things they have like TVs, microwaves, smartphones, dishwashers, etc. I know a lot about what Mr. Williams wrote because I wrote a column on the… Read More

IQ tests are controversial, but usually they do provide a pretty good overall look at a person’s or a region’s intelligence. The average IQ is 100. The tests have to be periodically adjusted to keep the average at the 100 mark. From the 100 average, the IQ distribution reflects the typical bell-shaped curve.

If you’ve not spend much time with people whose IQ is below the average, it may be hard to realize just how dangerous unrestricted (“pure”) democracy is. Remember, everyone’s vote counts the same in elections.

We all think of California as the land of smart people. Conservatives and libertarians are often puzzled how such a supposedly intelligent electorate can support liberal Democrats and their harmful policies.

Turns out, the underlying IQ premise is wrong. See below. The Golden State is the land of dummies.

California’s collective (average) IQ is lower than all but two states. Only the widely disparaged low intelligence states of Louisiana and Mississippi have a lower average IQ than California. And not by much. And like every state, no… Read More

We piled out of Los Angeles as soon as the national parks opened. We headed toward what the elite quaintly call the “flyover states.” The federal government own large chunks of the land there and moved Native American tribes to reservations in these states to get them out of the way. These states are largely free of COVID-19 and the overly aggressive restrictions on our lives. Enjoyment of our time was abridged by an incident that has now engulfed us all.

Watching the strangulation of a human being is stomach-churning. After three minutes I had to stop and skip to the end when the limp body of George Floyd was rolled onto a stretcher. The fact this was done by a person who was supposed to be a “lawman” made it completely appalling.

As the response to the incident started flooding our phones and email, it was quite apparent there was universal condemnation of the person wearing the uniform. I searched my mind to think when we were as unified in our country against an action by people wearing uniforms. I lurched all the way back to May 4, 1970, when improperly trained members of the national guard shot four students who were protesting at Kent State. Blacks,… Read More

As a poor, orphaned, “colored” boy born in the Deep South in 1939, I never had a moment’s doubt that someday my life would be better. My optimism flowed from the unbounded optimism of my maternal grandmother, with whom I lived in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, which occurred in 1943. The optimism of my grandmother came from her faith in God and her belief that our nation was a God-loving country which would someday, soon, “live out the true meaning of its creed,” as Martin Luther King Jr. so often said. That creed, Dr. King reminded us, was embedded in our Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

… Read More

Only a few days after I wrote that one of the real benefits of the pandemic would be the advancement of telehealth, a new policy was announced by Seema Varna, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Ms. Varna announced the loosening up of rules for providing patients greater access to their medical professionals via telecommunication. It is time to look deeper into the subject.

Prior to this policy change, CMS would only authorize charges for rural care. That recognized the practical aspect that doctors, etc., were not generally available in some areas and the only access for routine medical care was a lengthy trip across a county to see a doctor. Not only is this a problem for folks in rural areas but likewise for city folks. They have just as much of a struggle accessing their medical professionals because they are forced to fight crowded urban traffic for even a simple matter. Now that CMS has authorized these charges, hopefully all the private insurance companies will follow suit.

This issue came to the fore after I previously wrote a column about the undue burden that had been forced on doctors needing to maintain all… Read More

Even though we have been in 71 countries and more than forty states, we are accustomed to the culture of California and big cities. People talk about the “flyover states” and that is where this trip has taken us. Life is much different and refreshing.

The fact that these states did not experience the amount of hysteria over COVID-19 reflects their difference in life. We are willing to sacrifice a lot to live on the coasts. Just the idea that people in flyover states are indifferent to using plastic straws while our coastal society has made it a focus of our culture displays the small difference in our lives. The fact that no server has said “Do you want change” when presented with cash equal to more than the check amount speaks volumes about their life. They would never make such a presumptuous statement. They just bring the change back, never assuming the extra money is theirs.

We make movies and TV show in our culture and many times they are about people living in small towns. Almost invariably it casts a negative light on their “small” lives. It seemed to us with the many interactions with the people we encountered that they like their “small”… Read More